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dsavi (1540343) writes "The International Music Score Library Project's website imslp.org (A library of public domain scores and recordings of classical music) has been taken down by GoDaddy per a DMCA takedown request from the Music Publisher's Association. According to the MPA, a score of Rachmanioff's Bells is under copyright in the US, while according to IMSLP it is most definitely not. A DMCA counter-notice has been issued to GoDaddy by IMSLP, unfortunately there is a ten-day waiting period before the domain can be restored.
While the imslp.org domain is down, the music library can still be accessed at PetrucciLibrary.org. Anyone who is interested in helping with counter-suing the MPA can email imslproject at yahoo dot ca."Link to Original Source

The Blender Foundation and online developer community is proud to present Blender 2.57. This is the first stable release of the Blender 2.5 series, representing the culmination of many years of redesign and development work.
We name this version "Stable" not only because it's mostly feature complete, but especially thanks to the 1000s of fixes and feature updates we did since the 2.5 beta versions were published.
The next 2 months we will keep working on finishing a couple of left-over 2.5 targets and we expect to get feedback and bug reports from users to handle as well. If all goes well, the 2.58 version then can be the final release of the 2.5 series, with a massive amount of new projects to be added for an exciting cycle of 2.6x versions. Target is to release updates every 2 months this year.

Blender 2.5 features (Among many, many other things) a heavily redesigned UI, a Python 3.2 API that has access to every tool and almost all the data in the scene, and a new animation system with the motto "make anything animatable"."Link to Original Source

Nokia's oft-maligned unlimited music service looks set to be coming to an end after internal documents were leaked online.
According to Esphoneblog, no more Ovi Music Unlimited (formerly known as Comes With Music) devices will be shipped, and after 16 January this year customers have not been able to renew their unlimited music license.
The high price of the devices, as well as the music being hard to download and locked to a PC and phone, are some of the reasons touted for the low user base – had Nokia managed to bring DRM Comes With Music to everywhere, and not just China, then perhaps it would have been a different story.

To me, Nokia's "Comes with Music" service was like a predecessor to Spotify, which is what makes this so disappointing- I wouldn't be surprised if it was competition from Spotify itself that caused this change."Link to Original Source

dsavi (1540343) writes "Crew members of the comedy film Iron Sky (Directed by Timo Vuorensola of Star Wreck fame) were subjected to police brutality on the last night of a shoot in Germany for no apparent reason.
From their blog:

Long story short, we were spending the last night in Germany in a small bar after a sushi lunch, chatting about the last 1,5 months in Frankfurt and what to expect for the coming Australian shoot. I left the bar earlier that night, lucky me, since soon after I was gone, the police attacked the bar, dragged some of our crew members out, beat the s**t out of them and then left without an explanation.

...

We’re figuring out with a German lawyer the ways to proceed in order to get some justice – or at least some kind of an explanation – but given that the cops are most likely not going to admit they did anything wrong, and there was quite a heap of them, it might be quite hard.

dsavi (1540343) writes "A bit more than a year in the making, the open (Short) movie "Sintel" has been released by the Blender Foundation. This is the third "Open Movie", following "Elephant's Dream" (2006) and "Big Buck Bunny" (2008). All the graphics were created with open-source software, mostly in Blender, which was developed substantially in the process of making the film. The files used to create the film will be released later under a Creative Commons license.Download here, please torrent."

dsavi (1540343) writes "Everyone loves free stuff, and in the last ten years "free" has come to mean more than cheap handouts. So when sites like Napster broke through in 2000, they became tremendously popular- With relatively few questions as to the service's legality. Suddenly, someone realized it was "wrong"- Cue the era of good-versus-evil-style ridiculous propaganda, sometimes not only from the pro-copyright side. But ask yourself this: In 50 years, will you tell your (great?)grandchildren that "Back in my day, not only did we live with a 100mbit/s connection, but downloading movies was considered a crime!"? Or do you think that this could be an issue that only is related to the age we now live in, and die out with time? To me, it feels almost like a holy war- Neither side is really right, and both use dirty tactics and most of the time, do not approach the subject intelligently enough, rather jumping on the bandwagon of one or another. Don't get me wrong- Who doesn't love free stuff?- But both sides of any such perceived "debate" go over the top a lot of the time.
Maybe what I'm really asking is, do you really believe that sharing copyrighted content is right, that there is no shame in downloading non-free media for personal purposes? Or, conversely, do you really think that consumers should pay so much for something that only costs the music store bandwidth and royalties to the artist, etcetera etcetera?"

dsavi (1540343) writes "Ptex, Walt Disney Animation Studio's cutting-edge 3D texture mapping library which was first used on nearly every surface in the 2008 animated feature Bolt, was released under the BSD license on Friday. Quoting the announcement on monophyl.com:

We expect to follow Ptex with other open source projects that we hope
the community will find beneficial. We will soon be launching a new
Walt Disney Animation Studios Technology page under
http://disneyanimation.com/ . It will include links to our open source
projects as will as a library of recent publications.

BlacHoel writes "Luingo is a Facebook application for learning languages, mostly vocabulary. The application tests the user's vocabulary in the selected study language using audio recorded by native speakers (Or at least people who claim they are) to prepare them for the daily tests, and the tests themselves are multiple choice based, with the audio of each word/choice played back to hopefully make the user remember the correct answer. Right now anyway, the application is free. I'd like to get to the point though: The application is dyeing, and I think it's a shame to see so much work and code go to nothing like that. The application has some real graphic design issues and has the appeal of the average accountant's conference compared to a good deal of popular Facebook applications, but unlike those applications (Just think of those insanely popular apps like "Fancheck", an app that gained 5 million users in a single day) it has use and could even be a good alternative to relatively pricey solutions like Rosetta Stone, since the audio for the tests- And even the tests themselves- are crowdsourced, which reduces costs for the developers. Just new users isn't nearly enough to save it- with a few good ideas I think this app could really take off and help all kinds of serious or hobbyist language learners. What would you do to save it?"